Comment by ObscureScience
5 days ago
While it's hard to know what comes of it, there is also https://ladybird.org/ to challenge to monopoly of Blink.
5 days ago
While it's hard to know what comes of it, there is also https://ladybird.org/ to challenge to monopoly of Blink.
I just don't get the point of ladybird. They have full time engineers and are soliciting donations, so it's clearly more than a hobby project. Maybe my assumptions are off, but I just can't imagine they could ever become competitive in terms of features, security and performance with the big engines. Blink is setting the pace, Webkit is barely able to keep up and Gecko is slowly falling behind. All of these teams are orders of magnitudes larger than the Ladybird team. If you think that Blinks dominance is a thread to the web it's not enough to have an alternative engine you need enough adoption of that engine so web devs make sure their site is compatible with that engine. Most of this also applies to Servo, but at least their technical project goals (embeddable, modular, parallel, memory safe) sound at least moderately compelling. Maybe Ladybird has similar goals, but at least their website doesn't really state any technical goals.
It is donation funded with no reliance on outside parties. They don't have to inject ads into pages like brave did or sell out to Google compromising their independence on web standards.
They're ahead of Servo already anyway, and better funded.
In the last 24h alone Chromium merged almost 900 CLs (their equivalent to a pull request) into the src/Chromium repo, Ladybird had 7. Yes a project that started fresh a couple of year ago with decades of hindsight can be more efficient than one started 16 year ago as the fork of a fork, but if I had to guess they'll sooner or later reach a point where they have implemented the low hanging fruit and chromium moves faster away than they can catch up.
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Not being funded by Google money is a pretty big deal. Some of the developers are former webkit devs so they have a good foundation to start from. It remains to be seen if they can pull it off.
Orion adding Windows support (getting WebKit running on Windows again) would be pretty good too.
WebKit runs on Windows, the Windows port just needs work to bring it up to the level of the Linux port. I got every JIT tier enabled in JavaScriptCore [1] and enabled libpas (the memory allocator). The Windows port is moving to Skia in line with the Linux port.
Really just needs more people (and companies) pushing it forward. Hopefully Kagi will be contributing improvements to the Windows port upstream.
[1] https://iangrunert.com/2024/10/07/every-jit-tier-enabled-jsc...
Ladybird has better results in web rendering tests than Servo, and slowly is gaining on Firefox.
They are already quite competitive.
In the update videos posted on the Ladybird YouTube channel it's said that they have exhausted most of the low hanging fruit in terms of correctness. Browsers and the web standard have a very long tail of odd behavior that you need to implement. I could be wrong, but if I had to guess they'll stall at a point where it's just good enough that some people will make it work, but it's not really useful for general use.
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Ladybird is extremely slow, it's far from being competitive at all.
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Larger teams do not necessarily mean you get stuff faster. If anything after some point, a large team can be hard to get things moving and have tons of issues with communication.
Well Andreas Kling has worked on Safari and WebKit and (obviously) has talked to a lot of browser people. He knows what he is doing, and he frequently says that no one that has actually worked on a browser thinks it's impossible to create a new one, even with a small team (...of highly motivated and skilled people).
I think there are two things to keep in mind.
1) Apple and Firefox have enough resources to implement the most recent web standards. When you see a feature which goes un-implemented for too long, it’s almost surely because nobody was even working on it because of internal resourcing fights.
2) Devs aren’t created equal. It’s possible for a team of 8 people to be 10x more productive than another team of 8.
> When you see a feature which goes un-implemented for too long, it’s almost surely because nobody was even working on it because of internal resourcing fights.
Or because they are reluctant to implement it for technical reasons? Not every "standard" that gets thrown on the table and implemented by Google is a brilliant idea.
What's wrong with Webkit? It's super fast. I tested Orion browser recently.
Good implementations are hard to come by outside Apple's ecosystem.
I think the browser attempts are all wrong trying to "cover all edge cases" they should focus on being able to transform any and all dark patterns down into something simpler.
Hell starting out as extracting text, pictures, video for all nightmare sites. Then slowly add whatever features dont actually lead to dark patterns
If anything, Ladybird is an independent implementation of the web standards, and the devs have identified and helped solving quite a few bugs and and ambiguities in the standards, which benefits everyone, from browser devs including the big guns to web developpers and users.
It was the similar sentiment with 0xide.
I have to be honest that I don't really understand the appeal of Ladybird from a purely technical perspective. It is written in C++, just like all the existing engines (yes there is some Swift, but it is negligible), so what benefit does it provide over Gecko or Blink? With Servo, I can see there is a distinct technical design around security and parallelism.
There is more to a project this massive than its choice of language. For me though it's mostly about breaking from the monopoly and putting a check on Google's influence over browser space.
> There is more to a project this massive than its choice of language
For writing a game, or Figma replacement, or some cutesy something that runs on your machine without requiring network access, probably. For one of the most impactful applications that downloads untrusted code from the Internet and executes it without any confirmation whatsoever, the language for sure does matter. "Chrome RCE" is a phrase that strikes fear, and it's not a rare occurrence. I'll point out that Google is not lacking some of the most skilled security researchers and tooling in the world, so I wish the Ladybird folks godspeed doing their own "does this build have vulns?" work
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Many many factors to consider. Simplistic take: KHTML was picked up by Apple because of its clean design and codebase; there's an extra 30 years of accumulated improvements in C++; you don't write stuff in Rust 1.0 either.
Also: Andreas has worked on Webkit/Blink. He knew what he was doing when he started the project, even if it was "just for fun". Linux started under similar circumstances.
Linux started under circumstances of Linus wanting to learn 386 assembler. He got two processes writing alternating As and Bs to demonstrate 386 multitasking. Linus had to find SunOS docs etc to copy system call signatures from. It's truly an accidental success story, and while Linus is smart & capable he sure as hell did not "know what he was doing", the whole point was to learn and fiddle with it.
Starting a new browser project without a solid security architecture seems just a bad idea to me. It's such a hostile operating environment. Personal computing in the early 90s was a very different place.
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Rust does not produce magic in the assembly code. It does not even produce faster assembly code. Rust toolchain on it's own does not even produce assembly code. It just passes that to LLVM that does THE ENTIRE optimization. Without LLVM (written in C++) doing the heavy lifting, Rust is probably slower than V8 (written in C++) running JavaScript. There's no technical marver in Servo compared to Ladybird. I don't understand the yapping how a language makes projects good/bad, despite it being proven completely false again and again. The appeal is in independence and politics around the project.
The express purpose of building Servo in the first place was to experiment with ways to parallelize the layout algorithm. The advantage of Rust is that it is a language which enables the compiler to better enforce some of the rules that need to be followed to write correct thread-safe code. Note that Mozilla had previously tried--more than once--to do the same thing in C++ for Gecko, and both attempts had failed.
As for the rest of your comment... I believe Rust now has MIR-based optimizations, so it's no longer the case that "THE ENTIRE optimization" is due to LLVM. But it's a non-sequitur to say that Rust would be slower without LLVM. Rust doesn't do many optimizations on its own, because it's quite frankly a lot of boring tedium to implement an entire optimizing compiler stack, and if you've got a library you can use to do that, why not? If no such library were available, Rust would merely be implementing all of those optimizations itself, much as V8 implements those optimizations itself.
I hope it succeeds. Now they allow direct donations, so people who want it to succeed can help. I am sure these donations go directly into the development of the browser unlike with mozilla.
Worth pointing out that you can also sponsor Servo development: https://github.com/sponsors/servo
Looks interesting, but they're going to try writing it in Swift?
If you're writing a browser engine in C++, I may not like it, but I can see that you're pragmatic and are focused on the end result rather than the language. If you're writing it in Rust, okay, you maybe have your eyes on that pie in the sky, but you've chosen a language that, at least potentially, has the ability to replace C++ in creating bedrock software.
Any other language and I feel like someone with a lot of political capital at the company just has a personal preference for the language and so, "yeah, we're going to rewrite it all in Swift"[0].
I mean, you're writing a browser. Do you really want to build it in a language that is at the "it's improving" stage of support for the most popular operating systems?
[0]: https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031
You should look into why they chose it and what their implementation plan is. They evaluated multiple languages, including rust. There were some specific issues with rust that made it unsuitable for them. Swift was a bit of a dark horse candidate that the developers ended liking.
There is no immediate plan to switch to anything so it’s still C++. They may not ever switch. Swift’s cross platform support isn’t there yet and that’s a prerequisite.
I couldn't find any information beyond that Tweet I linked.
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